Nabokov's Butterflies 360

Nabokov's Butterflies 360

Nabokov's Butterflies 360

“A given landscape lives twice: as a delightful wilderness in its own right, and as the haunt of a certain butterfly or moth.”

Vladimir Nabokov
Author and Lepidopterist

The Butterfly Trail

The highways and roadside motels of pre-interstate America provided the backdrop for literary giant Vladimir Nabokov's famous novel Lolita. But they were also prime collecting grounds for Nabokov’s great passion, lepidopterology—the study of moths and butterflies.

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Pictured in later years, Nabokov maintained his passion for the study of butterflies throughout his life.

Horst Tappe/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Pictured in later years, Nabokov maintained his passion for the study of butterflies throughout his life.

Horst Tappe/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Nabokov was never a full-time entomologist, but he was an extremely knowledgeable amateur who published several scientific papers and described more than a dozen new butterflies.

Soon after moving to the U.S., Nabokov began volunteering in the Lepidoptera collections at the American Museum of Natural History. It was here that he met with early scientific encouragement and began to study the group that would later become his specialty: small Polyommatus butterflies known as blues. Recent genetic research has supported Nabokov’s 1945 hypothesis about the evolution of blues in the New World.

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Nabokov took many road trips over his lifetime and drove thousands of miles across the United States, but his first cross-country adventure was in the summer of 1941. The writer donated many of the butterflies and moths collected on that trip to the Museum.

There, despite stormy weather, he collected what he believed to be a new species, which he dubbed Neonympha dorothea in honor of their cross-country driver, Dorothy Leuthold.

It’s since been recognized as a subspecies—Cyllopsis pertepida dorothea.

September 8, 1941Yosemite National Park, California

The Nabokovs reached California in June. After several weeks at Stanford University, they visited Yosemite National Park, where the author couldn’t help but gather more butterflies.

Credit: Boston Public Library

On September 11, Nabokov wrote to Comstock, saying,

“I have done a good deal of collecting this season, and have had plenty of thrills and disappointments. The former consisted in meeting among their natural surroundings butterflies I had never seen before; the latter were the poor collecting grounds and bad weather.”

In the same letter, he offered the specimens he had collected that summer to the Museum.